Are they a help or hindrance in tech?
I've got quite a few periods in mine and are updating it at the moment. By reading some message boards it appears self employment is a really bad thing!
Any thoughts on how to market self employment?
Thanks :)
Sounds like a possible plan.
To be honest it's quite frightening writing a CV again! Haven't had to do it for a while!
If you have a habit of keeping a resume updated, and it's public, it's less of a signal to current employers as well too. I've heard many people say they don't ever want to public/post a resume because their current employer might find it. If you keep it public and posted all the time, as more of a "here's the great stuff I'm doing at XYZ", there's no 'signal' to be inferred.
That said, I know that wouldn't necessarily fly in ever industry, but... that's more social convention than anything else. If 90% of people behaved that way, that would be the 'new norm'.
That being said, having a nice list of what your good at is great. Also I really recommend having a summary at the top that is almost like a mini cover letter. Target it towards the job you're applying for for example:
Sudorank is a developer with experience developing mid-sized systems in ruby on rails hooking into legacy COBOL backends. Lauded for his/her ability to mentally parse XML, he/she can manually code systems using a magnetic needle. Comfortable leading teams Sudorank has had experience working a variety of fields, from bio-med to lifestyle startups.
Keep in mind is that you want to save the recruiter/HM time. They might be looking at 100 of these. Lead with why you're kickass.
Another handy trick is keep a plan text version for if you end up applying through any automated systems. Source control is your friend here.
a) To be brief and to the point (and honest), and b) to put your stuff in reverse chronological order -- so the recent (and hopefully relevant) stuff is up top.
The rest of it is there in case there's a weight test, or for when the CV has been shortlisted and is being given a closer look.
Finally, you need to exercise judgment in how fine-grained you get with "projects". You don't want to give the impression you're padding or claiming credit for projects you had little hand in. (And consider tailoring your CV for the job. I do not always do this, but I always do it for jobs I really care about.)
Once you've passed the stage where you're applying for entry-level positions, nobody really cares about "My duties involved..." style entries, or "I participated in..." or "I was involved with..."
Rather, it's all about "I designed and wrote four modules for XYZ product, three involving the internal messaging layer and a fourth interfacing with a legacy system, and performed code reviews for other subsystems," or "I was front-line support for XYZ product during its first high-growth period, during which I identified and categorized the most common issues and wrote several procedures to resolve them".
This style might only represent 20% of your actual work around that time, but it gives your potential employers something concrete to latch onto, and to an extent it lets you guide the course of the interview in ways you couldn't otherwise. It also lets you gloss over differences in employed/self-employed status because it shows you had a consistent work ethic (and presumably a consistent set of results) regardless of where you got your income at that time.
This may not work in certain jobs where they demand your credentials and want to check them by calling/emailing.
When I said self employed, people either heard "unemployed" or "marginal freelance person, barely made ends meet". When I switched to entrepreneur, people heard "successful businessman". The change was uncanny.
Now, my activities didn't change. So the questions to ask are:
1. How did the people complaining about self-employed mean the term?
2. Does that match what you do?
3. How should you brand it so that the person hiring you understands it correctly?
In general, I think it's seen as a positive thing, as long as you're talking about the kind of self-employment we mean here on Hacker News. Fairly lucrative, manage your own schedule, no shortage of clients, but more overhead and uncertainty than a job and a need to focus on non-technical stuff. The latter two points explaining why someone might want a job instead of self-employment.
At least being simply self-employed is easily explained away by just wanting to do some freelance work or consulting for a few months or whatever.
Sure, occasionally, you might get employers in the valley who (claim) they care a lot about your personal growth, but from my experience outside the tech world, plenty of employers would much rather just have a dull but trustworthy tool who gets the job done without fail to someone incredibly smart, unscrupulous, and motivated. To these people (which I will venture to say is the majority of small-business owners), your ambition is scary to them, so you're better off not coming off as being ambitious.
TL;DR: best way to market self-employment? Don't. Instead market it as regular employment where you had a lot of responsibilities.
Secondly, it's quite hard if you failed. I learnt a huge amount about running a company, building software, even about who I am, when I've been doing startups, but ultimately the main thing I've demonstrated is that I can put a lot of time and energy in to projects that fail. I didn't have the insight to change what needed to change to ensure success or to walk away earlier to limit my losses. Those aren't great things to show people.
All in all, being self-employed does make it harder to get a job afterwards. If you recognise why though, you can defend yourself against those issues that employers will have.
Employees are not to expect long-term loyalty style commitments from employers these days. Training, retirement investment packages, career paths and other intangibles that make a long-term commitment at a single employer potentially a good move don't exist anymore (at least not in any significant numbers).
Long-term investment with a single employer carries risks for the employees: opportunity costs, skill stagnation or over-specialization, far lower long-term compensation without internal "job hopping" up the management ladder (and even then it's not nearly the risk-free move it was even 20 years ago, let alone 30 or 40), etc. Employers don't acknowledge these risks the employees take, though, and simply demand loyalty without wanting to make an investment of their own other than a begrudgingly given compensation package (that is often below the actual value an employee provides).
Of course it's not fair; and that's just the way it is--it's something serial entrepreneurs and "job hoppers" should just be prepared to deal with.
I think self employment only looks bad when it's interspersed with very small periods of employment, from a couple of months to six months. Having long periods of unemployment, followed by short bursts of a couple of months here, three months there could maybe be interpreted as a sign that the candidate has a problem with keeping jobs, and that there are probably good reasons for that.
Having only ever been self employed could also be seen as a bad sign. Having never worked within a company, maybe the candidate has no teamwork skills, cannot work within a hierarchy, cannot keep a fixed schedule, etc.
I can't think of any other situations when self employment would look bad.
Thanks.
I'm going to guess your resume has a Google/Amazon/Facebook name brand on it somewhere.
That way you aren't self employed; you were employed at Sudorank LLC or something similar.
I haven't maintained a personal resume/CV is years; and have no plans to do so again. I do not share past client names with other potential clients. Recruiters don't know how to handle me, however it hasn't hurt my business.
For proof of skill people can review my books, articles, blog posts, or StackOverflow profile.
I assume my first meetings with clients are very different than interviews [although a few have had an interview-like feel].
At first, it felt like a hindrance, a decade-long black dot that I wanted to somehow hide. Now I'm proud of the period -- provided jobs, mentored, made things, etc. -- so it is easier to talk about.
I'm not going the hide that period. I'm going to be frank about it once I hit the streets. I made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of hard lessons, lessons that should help in whatever my new capacity is.
So I guess my advice is to be honest about those self-employed periods. They are what they are.
For example, here in Canada there's very little risk tolerance, regardless of what people tell you. You see it in the ways companies raise funds, are valued, and even the execution points. Being 'self-employed' can be a hindrance, especially in marketing. On the other side 'Founding X company - building the overall business to over $YY in revenue' is a positive spin on the same result.
On the other hand, discussing a project-based approach looks VERY good. At that point you're a consultant, rather than a contractor or freelancer. Here, that resonates better, in that people go 'ah, well paid expert'. This in turn means that you can pivot the discussion around to project successes, the values you've learned working on multiple projects, etc.
But most importantly, don't underestimate the value of the cover letter - which I used to believe no one reads. If you can explain your passion to join organization X (for some specific reason), then effectively you're priming your resume reader. That helps you positively change the conversation - a brilliant technique from behavioral economics.
Good luck!
In any case, it doesn't seem to cause any problems. I work as freelancer, so it makes every kind of sense that I have my own company.
I think it is more about your achieved goals, projects and skills, and less about who have you been working for. If I were you, I'd just concentrate my efforts in building projects where you show off your skills (blog/portfolio, github, etc...). IMO this can be more powerful than a CV.
That's how I did it; I just demo'd them the coolest apps I built and explained why they were cool (google tweeted about it, won the imagine cup with it, got covered by major news sites, etc.).
If your resume has traits that stand out for the position available, it'll catch the employers eye and increase your chances of getting an interview.
I'd recommend writing about projects you did that relate to the job posting combined with measurable facts about the results.
Hope that helps!
And those people would actually read it, because they already knew me and were trying to understand my background to decide whether or not to bring me on to a project. Unlike recruiters or hiring managers who are often just looking for a reason to throw a resume in the trash to thin out their crowd of applicants.
On one hand it gave me a lot of first-hand experience with a lot of things, and second it shows that i'm not keen on sitting on my hands.